Neal Rauhauser: Foreign Policy’s Global Conversation Infographic

The images and following text were taken from The Global Conversation on Foreign Policy’s site. The site’s graph is user zoomable and the second image shows President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and Edward Snowden. I may have to hunt up a print copy and read the full article on this.

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What happens when you take six months of news coverage from around the world and compile a list of every person mentioned and the people they were mentioned alongside? You get a network of 3 million nodes connected by 42 million links. Based on the GDELT Global Knowledge Graph — a massive compilation of the world’s people, organizations, locations, themes, emotions, and events — this visualization highlights the 25,000 newsmakers mentioned most frequently from April to October 2013 and the 100,000 connections among them.

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The yellow cloud represents coverage of the U.S., with President Barack Obama near its center. Countries and regions make up many of the other, larger clusters. The relative centrality of the clusters, their size, and the strength of their ties to other countries give a sense of how prominent each area has been in news coverage and, by inference, the degree of importance world leaders give them. (Zoom in to see the names of individual newsmakers and their connections.)

This visualization is, in essence, a snapshot of the global conversation — not only whom we are talking about and how much, but how each separate discussion is connected to every other discussion and the greater whole. It’s a new way of gauging what matters to us, and it’s just one of the ways in which big data is changing the way we see the world.

Phi Beta Iota: The above is the most obvious and the most corrupt conversation, i.e. the one as depicted by a media that is generally (not completely) corrupt. A second conversation takes place in secret among the so-called policy professionals. A third conversation takes place, generally in secret, among the commercial professionals, with the banks having their own special conversation that is as we now know, totally criminal in nature, manipulating the LIBOR rates, among other crimes. Finally you have the varied conversation in social media and among the eight tribes of information generally. Our point: All of these conversations are divorced from one another, and divorced from reality — there is no intelligence with integrity (holistic analytics with true cost economics as the foundation) behind ANY of these conversations.